A Day Spent in Edmonton

Today, I just flew back from Edmonton for an interview with the Government of Alberta. I am pretty dead tired, mostly from waking up at around 3:30 in the morning from the heat in my hotel room. Here are some of my random thoughts in somewhat chronological order from the time I boarded my flight to now.

• Headed to YVR about 2.5 hours early and went to the bookstores to find new books to read. After some time spent browsing the books, I went to Tim Hortons for a hot chocolate and to review my book on interview questions. With about 1.5 hours left, I decided to head over to my gate and plug in my laptop to talk to a few people about my interview.
• When I booked my flight online and looked at the seating chart, it showed that seat D out of the consecutive seats D, E and F (I was in F) was taken. Once I was on the plane and they shut the doors, seat D was empty - I wondered whether someone missed their flight, or perhaps the person in Seat D went to sit with others.
• I arrive in Edmonton after trying to lip read about half of the movie "How to lose friends and alienate people"
• As I wait for my luggage on the conveyor belt, here are some of the strange items I see: various pieces of luggage, large crate with marker all over, red tool box and then finally my bag!
• I arrive at the hotel pretty hungry so I drop off my stuff in my room and then head down to Madison's Grill (the restaurant in the Union Bank Inn) for a candy almond crusted salmon. I liked the mix of sweet and salty and want to try making it myself one day.
• Everybody else in the restaurant is dressed quite nicely. I, on the other hand, am dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and try my best to look as inconspicuous as possible.
• After eating the delicious salmon (love seafood!), I head back to my room to try to get some sleep. I totally forget about the jet lag and so I end up falling asleep about an hour after I try to sleep.
• 4 hours later, I wake up from the heat of the room. I had turned the fan off earlier (there was only one fan for the room and no separate fan for the bathroom) so that I could fall asleep but it had gotten so hot that I woke up anyway. I try to fall back asleep with various combinations of fans on / off, blankets on / off and with the window not opening, I get up and decide to prep for my interview by reviewing my questions and answers again.
• Around 7 AM, I get a wake-up call. Before I went to bed, I looked around for the fitness room and see that there is a treadmill and a step machine as well as a few dumbbells. I head down to the fitness room for a 20 min run and then come back up to shower.
• I head down to breakfast and order the West Coast Eggs (smoked salmon, poached eggs and a lemon dill hollandaise sauce with a fresh fruit salad and some taters). After exchanging some kind words with the waitress, I head back up to change.
• As I walk to the Law Courts Building, I realize that I did not bring enough clothing. It is -3 and significantly colder than I thought it would be. (Later on, I heard from my taxi driver that it was -42 a few weeks ago, I secretly feel glad that I wasn't here to interview then)
• I thought the interview went well - I got a tour of the 3 libraries and meet many of the staff working there. I also get a very cool story of the heritage room (built by the grandson of Nelly McClung). It reminds me of the heritage core in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
• At around 11, the manager of the interviewed position, a coworker and I head to the foodcourts through the underground passages. The underground passages are very cool and remind me of the very cool +15's in Calgary
• I get to the YEG and try to find books to read that have nothing to do with interviewing or programming. I mull over buying the Watchmen comic book but finally decide to leave without it (though I feel that if given another chance, I would buy it)
• Once I claimed my luggage, I went to the bookstores in YVR looking for the Watchmen comic but cannot find it (oh well). I head home and now I'm going to crash

All in all, it was a great experience in Edmonton despite the cold and the lack of sleep.

Authenticity, Job Search and Hong Kong

On Authenticity:

Lately and even not so lately, I've been thinking about authenticity. What does it mean to be an authentic and genuine person? I think through my work as a residence advisor and conversations with other residence advisors, I have heard about these stories of 'fake' advisors. These are advisors who act one way around their residents or around residents in general and then act another way to their friends or even after they are no longer a residence advisor.

That really got me thinking about whether I put out a genuine attitude to my residents - did I act one way around my residents and then act another way after I was no longer required by my job to be nice to my residents? I certainly didn't think it was that way but it's always hard to tell when you're involved in something to make a very clear and unbiased objective conclusion from all the facts that you think of and present to yourself. I also got to thinking about my friends and the new people I meet; do I act the same around everyone that I meet?

That's when I realized that I certainly do try my best to act the same way around all my friends. Given that most of my friends know me as a fairly nice, funny and somewhat witty person, I feel that I do act like my true self around most of the people I meet.

Why this authenticity stuff really got to me lately was because over the summer, I had befriended many people (at least I thought I did). For some reason, and this is only my intuition talking, which by the way is quite accurate most of the time, I feel that sometimes we are 'forced' into friendships because of work or mutual friends and such. It is a weird feeling to think that you are friends and then once that mutual thing that brought you two together is gone, your friendship somehow disappears. It is especially weird to be the only person to think that you are still friends. As I was saying, over the summer, I was talking to a friend about how I had befriended some of these people and my friend said that even though they knew one of my friends, they did not feel like my new friend was a genuine person. This was not based on brief encounters but rather, extended observations through my new friend's work and behavior towards others. I usually don't take these with too much weight and I honestly gave my new friend a chance to prove themselves. Anyway, this is fairly vague but I think I have my answer.


On job searching:

These past few weeks, I have been looking for job opportunities in the technical industry, mainly of the entry-level / new graduate type. Suffice to say, it is difficult. I'm not really sure whether its because of the recession, my resume / cover letter / qualifications, or even if I'm off the hiring cycle but maybe it's even a combination of all 3. I really wish there were some dedicated sites that told new graduates which companies hire new graduates, which companies have leadership development programs (for those on the prowl: Bell, Telus, General Electric, Deloitte are to name a few) and although I have found a few (again, eluta, collegegrad.com, collegerecruiter.com, aftercollege.com), a lot of the jobs I'm applying to I haven't heard back from. It's also a bit disheartening to hear back from the companies you did coop with and get rejected. It really gets me thinking about whether its because of my job application or because of my job performance that I was rejected at those companies (and I guess there's an outside chance it could be the recession). Anyway, just a few of my thoughts about job search right now - I'll continue looking and hopefully I'll be able to find one soon to start in January. I'm really itching to start full-time work somewhere so that I can bring in some new ideas and bring about some sort of positive change in the world.


About Hong Kong:

Very recently, my mom told me that she heard that my grandma was not feeling very well and with that being the case, my mom booked for herself and me, two tickets to Hong Kong for 2 weeks to visit my grandma. While I do enjoy traveling, I thought about the awful 15 hour flight and what I have to do to prepare myself. As I hear after the ticket booking, we will be arriving in Hong Kong at around 7 pm - this means that in order to adjust to the jet lag, I would have to stay up at least 10 hours in the latter part of the flight. It might be possible to sleep the first half of the flight and just stay up for the later half but I'm not too sure.

The great thing about Hong Kong is that its such a shopping haven - the first time I went, I don't think I really did that much shopping apart from clothing and I plan to do some more clothing shopping when I head back (Giordano, G2000 and Esprit come to mind). We may also book a tour to head to another Asian country but since we will be booking that in Hong Kong, I will be learning more about that later.